There’s a great deal of speculation and hope that the British Government will collapse, we can have new elections and comrade Corbyn can be installed to begin his thousand year rain of blood. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way.
As I’ve said before, Theresa May is a control freak on a power trip. She really, really likes being in charge, but doesn’t have much in the way of actual beliefs beyond that. Brexit, however, is a poison chalice. A hard brexit will trigger a major recession, and the Tory party is split down the middle on whether that would benefit their donors or not. Displeasing either group might mean a vote of no confidence against May, the one thing she doesn’t want. Recessions can be very good for the rich – between 2008 and 2009 the richest people in this country doubled their wealth, and they’re itching to do the same again. On the flipside, causing a massive collapse is likely to play poorly at the ballot box and hard brexit will anger the DUP. How do they get out of this situation?
I think the plan is going to be to prolong the brexit negotiations until we HAVE to have another general election, and then crash out of the EU without a deal just before then. The Tories well know that if there’s another election, all things being equal Labour would win, but if they’re immediately forced to deal with a major crisis they might be picking up the pieces for years and be too busy to do things like remove the contractors from the NHS. The press will endlessly blame the brexit fallout on socialism, after which there will be another election and Corbyn might have died or been knifed by the Blairites before then. The establishment will be back in charge and this embarrassing Jezza incident will be over.
Backing up this conjecture is the fact that our government clearly haven’t been arguing in good faith with the EU negotiators and this is becoming more and more apparent particularly to the Europeans. May might well be able to kick the can down the road by asking for extensions to B-Day indefinitely. So, good news if you actually like watching this fucking tedious pantomime.
There’s a possibility there will be early elections before then. If the ruling coalition cannot pass a budget, or if there’s a parliament-wide vote of no confidence, then it will collapse and this basically makes for an immediate election. The thing is, both the DUP and the Tories hate the idea of Corbyn winning far more than they hate each other. The DUP are fractious allies to say the least, and have repeatedly spited the Tories so far in parliament. However when it comes to a budget they can be bought off, just as they were with free school means the other day, when the Conservatives snatched away food from British children but spared those in Northern Ireland after a DUP outcry. A vote of no confidence is unlikely to happen for similar reasons – the DUP won’t vote no confidence in HMG if the alternative is Corbyn, not in a million years.
I mentioned elections with all things being equal – but in a few years time, they won’t be. In the United States, gerrymandering and voter suppression has locked the Republicans into power in many states, even if they can’t command a majority of actual votes. The conservatives have studied this situation well and the playbook is to scream about a couple of people voting twice before requiring ID cards or literacy tests and redrawing the map, which is the real way to steal elections. The Boundary Commission are nominally independent but they have returned a provisional map in 2016 that would cost Labour 30 seats right off the bat. Their proposals in Northern Ireland were fairly neutral and would have given Sinn Fein a slim majority – however after the Tory-DUP deal, the commission claimed they needed to modify their plans for extremely unrelated reasons, and in January their proposed map was leaked showing that they’d packed the constituencies in order to give the DUP an extra five seats, clogging up the Northern Irish government for years to come. This is telling, to say the least.
The changes would certainly come into place before a 2022 election. They’d have to pass parliament, but I’ve no doubt they’d go through along party lines. Sinn Fein are not going to swear an oath to the queen, in spite of the plaintive cries of guardian columnists – it’s not like there haven’t been crises in the past that they’ve sat out for. While the conservatives are privately pessimistic about their chances against Corbyn, if they won the election they’d be well placed to execute the plans of the vulture capitalists who finance the brexiteer MPs.
So where does this leave us? All my analysis is based on nothing too insane happening in the next few years – take a moment to stifle your laughter. The EU could put their foot down and stop negotiating, the troubles could start again and destabilize the entire country, Rupert Murdoch could finance a coup and install Britain First as a new government, May might get her head stuck in a toilet and drown, Corbyn might accidentally grow the plant from little shop of horrors in his allotment and never be heard from again, who knows? I can’t forsee it. But as far as I can tell, the above is what is most likely to happen in the next few years.
It’s grim to think that we’re going have this depraved cruel freakshow running our government long into the future. But our path was never easy, and the work can begin right now – work with your neighbours, talk to them, find out their needs and together, arrange to meet them. We don’t act like a society anymore, but the first step to breaking free of Thatcher’s utopia begins with us talking to the folks across the street! With austerity continuing apace (in Britain at least), there will be plenty of suffering that we will have to deal with, and if we face it with zeal, determination and solidarity, we will win whoever is in power.